40 YEARS SINCE THEIR LEAGUE ONE PROMOTION, THE CUFC LEGEND TALKS PLAYING TOP-FLIGHT FOOTBALL, TEAM SPIRIT, AND THE LIKELIHOOD OF THE BLUES’ ESCAPING RELEGATION.
Upon first meeting Hugh McIlmoyle, one may be forgiven for thinking this isn’t the same man who’s something of a Cumbrian hero, a man with a statue of himself in pride of place outside Brunton Park, a man whose name is nothing short of legend where Carlisle United is concerned.
Indeed, when his wife Rosalind guides us into their living room, he’s deep in conversation with the builder who’s been round to work that morning. He’s wearing tartan slippers and, aside from the odd bits of footballing memorabilia dotted around the room, there’s nothing to suggest he is the icon everyone believes him to be.
But spend five minutes with him, and you’ll find yourself wondering why you ever doubted it. Physically you can tell he was a footballer. Now 74, he’s still in pretty good shape. When he talks, it’s in a warm Scottish brogue that’s full of passion for the game, for the club, and his own experiences.
Our meeting is no coincidence. This year marks the 40th anniversary of Carlisle United’s promotion to League One, a feat the famous Liverpool and ex-Carlisle manager Bill Shankly praised as “the greatest feat in the history of the game”. For McIlmoyle, the promotion to top-flight football came at a time when he was considering hanging up his boots, having already played for Carlisle twice in his career.
“It was ’73, I was at Greenock Morton, and I was on the verge of retiring,” he explains. “At the beginning of July I got a phone call from David Dent, who was the secretary at Carlisle United, asking me to go down and see him, and he wanted to sign me on. You can imagine the surprise it was for me!” he laughs. The choice was a no-brainer: “I signed on for them for the third time.”
“One thing Carlisle always had when I was playing with them in the sixties and seventies was team spirit, you know? For me, you need to have that in teams if you’re going to progress.”
Carlisle entered the First Division in 1974. To this day, it remains the lowest populated location in England to have a team in the top league since 1906.
“Everybody was looking forward to it so much because it was a bit of a miracle, you know? In this day and age there is no chance at all that a club as small as Carlisle could enter the Premiership. None whatsoever.” He doesn’t come across as cynical; it’s just a fact of modern football. “Back then in the sixties and seventies it was more of a level pitch. Everybody was probably on the same wage, you know, a fiver here or a tenner there.”
Carlisle faced Chelsea in the first game of the season, a game that the North London side were strong favourites to win. “You know,” says McIlmoyle fondly, “there’s a lot of things I forget about the past but that, I’ll never forget about it. Coming out of the tunnel and all the Chelsea players were standing there shaking our hands. You see it all the time now, they do it regularly, but for them to do that…” he trails off, temporarily lost in the incredible memory.
“Obviously everyone expected them to win, but one thing Carlisle always had when I was playing with them in the sixties and seventies was team spirit, you know? For me, you need to have that in teams if you’re going to progress. We weren’t frightened or anything, we just went out. We knew we were a strong team and when we got the first goal it just seemed to enlighten everything, and then the second goal and that was it. It was a game I’ll never forget.”
Carlisle won 2-0, and went on to top the table with further wins over Middlesborough, Spurs and a famous double over Everton. Despite being relegated at the end of the season, it will forever be remembered as the year the small northern city took on the big names without fear. The notion of team spirit is a recurring theme of our conversation, and clearly something McIlmoyle takes seriously.
“It was a big thing then, to have this team spirit,” he says. “I mean obviously it doesn’t work for all teams but if you’ve got a good manager he knows what it is to have it. One time at Carlisle we only had 18 players and didn’t have a reserve team, but the team spirit was 100%.”
And now, with the current Carlisle team sitting perilously close to relegation (at the time of writing), it’s even more important. For him, there’s a clear connection between feeling like you’re part of a team, and playing well. He’s always spoken openly about his love for the city and people of Carlisle, and it was this sense of being part of something brimming with that energy that helped him make a name for himself during his first stint at United in 1963. The result spoke for itself; during the ‘63/’64 season he broke the goal-scoring record, hitting the net 44 times.
“I got 44 that particular season, but it didn’t bother me,” he muses. “I didn’t go out and think: ‘I’ve got to score today’. I think someone said to me it was 39 or 42, the record, and I don’t know if it was psychological but I then went four or five games without scoring!”
“When you get into a winning streak it’s good. You have bags of confidence obviously, but when you’re losing you get the opposite effect. Once you start losing it’s difficult to get out of it. It’s in your head.”
His abilities as a prolific goalscorer caught the attention of Wolverhampton Wanderers. He left Brunton Park for Molineux at the end of 1964, making 90 appearances for Wolves. The most memorable of which for him was against an all-star Manchester United, where he scored two goals in the first five minutes. “I remember it was a half seven kick-off. I scored two in a couple of minutes and I looked at the clock and it read twenty-five-to and I thought: ‘Bloomin’ ‘eck, two-nothing up!’”
But it was always at Carlisle that he felt he belonged. “There are some places you go to and it might be nice, you might think it’s nice, but I’ve never lost the same feelings as I’ve got now from forty, or fifty years ago when I first came. It’s just the same. It’s just a nice place to be.”
Again, he puts this down to an overriding sense of morale. It isn’t something you can manufacture and it isn’t something that comes solely from the training ground. So how did he do it? McIlmoyle would often go out with his Carlisle teammates and strike up conversation with fans in the pub. “It got you out in the community but also got you that bonding. You were going out with your friends and you take that onto the pitch with you and it’s something that’s hard to break in.”
“I mean obviously they couldn’t do that now because…” He pauses, trying to think of the reason that’s stopping today’s Carlisle players from forming a closer bond with the fans. He gives up. “I don’t know why,” he sighs.
“They just live in a different world from what we did. We were working-class, whereas now they’re way above…I think that’s partly the bonding and another big thing – everybody lived in Carlisle, you know? The whole team, the manager, assistant manager, they lived in Carlisle. Whereas now, they come from the north, they come from Yorkshire, places like that.”
The problem Carlisle face now is their lack of confidence, and a team that seems to change every week – something McIlmoyle attests. “I go down to Carlisle nowadays and I don’t know who’s playing!” Now, with only a handful of games left for the Blues to fight relegation, it’s down to the fans to give the players something to fight for, because they’re going into games with their heads down. McIlmoyle has noticed this, too. “Individually, they’re not playing as well.”
“No,” he corrects himself. “I don’t mean not as well. When you get into a winning streak it’s good. You have bags of confidence obviously, but when you’re losing you get the opposite effect. I think that’s similar to what’s happening now, what actually happened halfway through the season when we were in the Premiership, the confidence went. And then, they started to buy players in and it just didn’t work out. Once you start losing it’s difficult to get out of it. It’s in your head.”
Hugh McIlmoyle is a footballer from a bygone era. Gone are the days of equal (not astronomical) wages, dropping into the local for a pint on a Wednesday evening, and the players painting the offices at the ground. Football nowadays is preoccupied with sports psychologists, everyday weigh-ins and money.
But if he’s anything, McIlmoyle certainly isn’t defeatist. With relegation a very real possibility, though, what does he honestly feel about United’s chances? “Down here [pats stomach] I think they’ll do it, but up here [points at head] I know it’s near enough impossible.”
McIlmoyle will remain a United hero for as long as Carlisle stays a football club, whatever the league. Forty years since reaching the First Division, he still considers it “the greatest thing they’ve done”.
“That’s always going to be there,” he smiles, “and you can’t take that away from them.”
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